BOCOG says it will offer cheaper Olympic tickets to young Chinese people. This announcement came at the 88th BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad) Executive Board meeting.

The Olympic education-related ticketing program will focus on the school children involved in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Education Program and young athletes of the same age-group. The tickets to the opening/closing ceremonies are not included.

The decision was made in accordance with a request by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and in reference to the practice of previous Olympic Games.
Source: Jongo News

There is nothing like a list of statistics to help you get the Olympic Games into perspective. Here are some:

28 Olympic programs, 302 sub-categories.
302 gold medals.
10,500 athletes are expected to participate.
21,880 torchbearers will run 137,000 km over 130 days.
The National Stadium (now and for ever called the Bird’s Nest) covers an area of 258,000 sq. meters and has 91,000 seats.
The surface of the National Aquatics Center is covered by 1,437 pieces of transparent material.
The highest price for the opening ceremony tickets is RMB5,000, the lowest is RMB200.
Beijing expects 550,000 international visitors and 2.4 million domestic spectators.
Over 800 star-class hotels and 4,000 hostels will provide about 420,000 over-priced rooms.

If you have an established domicile in China you can try to get a ticket on the official Beijing Olympics website. Phase 1 has ended but in October 2007 there is a new chance.
Source: China Snippets

300,000 people across China have become the first group to get tickets for the 2008 Olympic Games. Organizers have released the outcome of allocation for the first round of booking.

The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG) said that a total of 1,593,345 tickets would be allocated to over 300,000 people and that all the 26,000 tickets to the opening ceremony had been sold out, with only one winner for every 21 applications.

Basketball, diving, table tennis, football and gymnastics were the top five high-demanding sports events and 34.6% of the applicants would be allocated tickets for the sports events. For the closing ceremony, 15.1% of the 172,219 applicants were lucky enough to get a ticket.

The first round of ticket sales started in mid April and ended by June 30. During this period, the Beijing Olympic ticketing center received more than 720,000 applications, requesting for 5.18 million tickets. Due to higher demand for some tickets, 72% of the 2.2 million tickets available to the public during the first phase were sold.

Rong Jun, head of the Olympic ticketing center, said that for oversubscribed events, a random computerized selection process was used to ensure the fairness of allocation. He said, ‘The process was totally transparent and fair.’

The second stage of the tickets selling will start from October with the principal of ‘first come, first served’. People can book tickets through a hotline, the official ticketing website and Bank of China branches.

About seven million tickets are put on sale to the public for the 2008 Games, with over 70% reserved for domestic sales. Prices range from RMB30 ($3.97) to RMB5,000 ($660).
Source: People’s Daily Online

Beijing is looking forward to 2008. The Russians to 2014. Thus in the Russian press articles have been appearing regarding the potential profit or loss of holding the Olympic Games. Note the source of the facts in this article is Russia.

The Olympic Games are more often an economic loss than a gain. Where they have made a profit there has been a major involvement by private enterprise.

As a working rule the Olympic Games are only profitable if they are funded by private capital as well as by the government, and the more the better for a host nation.

The Olympics in Moscow in 1980 and in Athens in 2004 saw the biggest losses. In both cases, they were fully financed by the government.

The figures on the Moscow Olympics are still classified but guess at $250 million. Three years ago, Greece ended up with a record loss — total revenues from the $14 billion games barely exceeded $2 billion.

The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles was totally privately funded and made a profit of $220 million owing to clever Olympic marketing. For the first time in Olympic history potential sponsors were divided into three groups and they were given the exclusive right to use Olympic symbols depending on the size of their contribution.

Exclusively funded by private companies, the 1996 Atlanta Games also yielded a handsome profit of about $600 million. Mainly because budgets were tightly adhered to and much of the infrastructure was temporary and, controversial but fairly widely accepted, sub-standard.

Such figures are difficult if not impossible to predict.

The Australian Olympics entire budget was $1.5 billion. It the aftermath of 9/11 and the start of the war in Iraq Athens has to spend that much on security alone.

Statistics paint an optimistic picture. Thus, the sale of broadcasting rights for the 1960 Rome Olympics produced a little more than one million dollars; the relevant figure for Los Angeles in 1984 was $287 million, and for Athens in 2004, $1.5 billion.

Note that the biggest snout in the trough is always the IOC. Whereas the host country organizers get 49% from the sale of broadcasting rights (the biggest item in the Olympic budget, constituting on average 53% of all revenues), the rest goes to the IOC. The host country also receives half of sponsors’ contributions (amounting to 34% of all income on average). And though the national organizing committee receives 95% of ticket sales, their share is not big — only 11% of the total. It is also entitled to all revenues from the sale of licenses during the Games, but they account for a mere 2% of all income.

What does the IOC do with the immense income it gets from the Games? Good question. It is not totally clear but plainly there must be international support for the Olympics involved in some way.
Source: Ria Novosti

According to a report released by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) most of those who booked tickets online for the 2008 Beijing Olympics are male and young. Based on a poll of 2,203 replies the report found men account for 86.7% of all Olympics enthusiasts.

More than 90% of all who booked tickets during the first booking session from April 15 to June 30 are aged between 18-40, leaving only 7.6% above 40, and 2.1% below 18.

Although farmers and migrant workers make up more than half of the Chinese population, they only account for 1.4% of all online bookings which is pretty understandable because they generally do not have Internet connection. College students constituted the biggest group with 22.7% possibly because they do have Internet connections and tend to be better off than farmers and migrant groups.

Beijing leads all provinces across China in the numbers of bookings. Together with the country’s relatively developed east provinces, they have 70.2% of bookings.

CNNIC, a web researching and managing body under China’s Ministry of Information Industry, released the report shortly after the first session of Games ticket bookings was completed on June 30.

The second session reopens in October.
Source: China Daily